PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY PRESENTS "CREATIVE FICTIONS" AN EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS BY SCOTT EVERINGHAM AND MICHÈLE PROVOST

SCOTT EVERINGHAMMICHÈLE PROVOST

CREATIVE FICTIONS

MAY 28 TO JULY 15, 2012

ARTIST RECEPTIONFRIDAY, JUNE 1, 20125:30 P.M. TO 9 P.M

ARTIST TALKTHURSDAY, JUNE 21, 20127 P.M.

PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY is pleased to present CREATIVE FICTIONS, an exhibition of new works by Toronto painter SCOTT EVERINGHAM and Quebec multi-media artist MICHÈLE PROVOST. The exhibition brings together two distinct bodies of work—Everingham's "All Stones Can Be Moved," and Provost's "Speedreading"—for a unique collaboration that uses literature as a departure point for exploring the ephemerality and transience inherent in contemporary existence.

In both bodies of work, Scott Everingham and Michèle Provost engage with notions of language, narrative, and storytelling; Everingham through the medium of paint, and Provost through textiles, hand-made paper, collage, and needlepoint. Everingham's paintings reveal barely constructed edifices, floating in the air without foundation. In Provost's work, individual letters, isolated from their original texts, hover above the lines, interspersed with legible words, phrases, or poems, but nonetheless fragmented and rootless. In both cases, their work is built on omission, creating a sense of disorientation as we struggle to make sense of the gaps. In so doing, the artists draw attention to the spaces in-between, a region where the abstract notions of "home" and "culture" reside.

In Creative Fictions, Everingham and Provost both use literature as a point of departure. The title of Everingham's body of work, ALL STONES CAN BE MOVED, is drawn from José Saramago's political fable The Stone Raft, while Provost's SPEEDREADING is composed of the first letters in lines of text from renowned French poets and authors including Boris Vian and Hergé, creator of The Adventures of Tintin. For both Everingham and Provost, the texts provide the foundation for their own "creative fictions," written using their unique visual vocabularies. While Everingham uses line, form, and colour to construct his narratives, Provost explores the formal and conceptual quality of letters themselves, often echoing the subtle wordplay and made-up vocabulary evident in Vian's own work.

Both artists create tension between coming together and breaking apart, heightening the ephemerality and transience inherent in contemporary existence. Together, Everingham and Provost engage in a dialogue surrounding our globalized world, in which "home" is not a stable concept and life passes by at such a frenetic pace that we can only absorb a fraction of the information that surrounds us.

SCOTT EVERINGHAMScott Everingham creates environments and worlds that have yet to exist. Spaces are built and dismantled as if in a single moment of time where life and its bi-products are created by paint, rather than with reality that is familiar. What is central to Everingham's work is interpreting growth through the collaboration between assembled space, and paint as the visceral tool used to create it. The artist's strong interest in fiction, and the nature of fiction itself, allows the work to develop with a controlled impulse, often relying on chance and error to move each painting to completion. Each stroke is crafted based on the stroke before it, and a work progresses quickly and without delays until considered finished. This immediacy is indicative of how each painting is put together: various selections of colour and brushstroke mimic the natural and fabricated world, often with utopian and dystopian results. Scott Everingham holds a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, and an MFA from the University of Waterloo, and was a semi-finalist in the 11th and 12th RBC Canadian Painting Competitions. Everingham recently won a Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant, and his work can be found in the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank. He has exhibited at numerous international art fairs including Art Toronto, Art Chicago, and New York's The Armory Show. He lives and works in Toronto.

MICHÈLE PROVOSTMichèle Provost's professional art practice is focused on an examination of contemporary consumer culture, and a serious reflection on the place of art creation in our consumer-oriented society. Her art is often comprised of handmade objects and intensive needlework images that take common objects from popular culture and transform them into commentary on consumerism, appropriation, copyright, the commerce of art, the relevance of art and art history for the general public, as well as heroism and violence in comic book culture. Provost's work can be found in the collections of Loto Québec, Canada Council Art Bank, Comunika, City of Gatineau, City of Ottawa, Carleton University, Seneca College, and The Ottawa Art Gallery. She has exhibited at numerous galleries including The Ottawa Art Gallery, Carleton University Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Sudbury, Dunlop Gallery, Musée du costume et du textile du Québec, Gallery 101, Richmond Art Gallery, Maison de la culture de Gatineau, Textile Museum of Canada, Galleria Bonaire Contemporanea, Alghero, Italy, Projetto Arti Visivi, Berchidda, Italy, Karsh-Masson Gallery, SAW Gallery, and the Dalhousie Art Gallery. She has a Diploma in visual arts from the Ottawa School of Art, and degrees in Woodcarving and photography from the Norwich Arts Centre, and in Printmaking and Mixed Media, from the Artists' Warehouse Studios, both in Norwich, England. She is the recipient of the 2009 Prix du Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec pour la création artistique, the 2010 Mid-Career Achievement Award, from the Council for the arts in Ottawa. Provost is currently participating in FRESH air FRAIS, the artist-in-residence research and exhibition program at Ottawa's Bytown Museum.

IN OTHER GALLERY NEWS...

• We are pleased to announce representation of Quebec photo-based artist THOMAS KNEUBÜHLER. Kneubühler's professional practice often deals with social issues and how technology affects people's lives. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in both Europe and North America, most recently at the Québec Triennial 2011 at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. In 2011, he was awarded the Pratt & Whitney Canada Prize of the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Kneubühler has a Master's Degree in Studio Arts from Montreal's Concordia University.

• PMG artist JOSÉE DUBEAU is featured in the current issue of Montreal's ESSE magazine. The magazine presents an illustrated discourse and retrospective of the Quebec-based conceptual artist. For more information: http://www.esse.ca/